anapest

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. A metrical foot composed of two short syllables followed by one long one, as in the word seventeen.

n. A line of verse using this meter; for example, "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house” ( Clement Clarke Moore).

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, two short and one long (e.g the word "velveteen").

n. A fragment, phrase or line of poetry or verse using this meter; e.g. “Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot, but the Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville, did NOT!” (Dr Seuss aka Theodor Geisel).

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, the first two short, or unaccented, the last long, or accented (˘ ˘ -); the reverse of the dactyl. In Latin dĕ-ĭ-tās, and in English in-ter-vene", are examples of anapests.

n. A verse composed of such feet.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. In prosody, a foot consisting of three syllables, the first two short or unaccented, the last long or accented: the reverse of the dactyl.

Examples

That verse wherein the accent falls on every third syllable, may be called trisyllabic verse; it is equivalent to what has been called anapestic; and we will still use the term anapest to express two unaccented and one accented syllable.

The first two iambs are followed by something almost like a qualitative anapest (in English we do meter based on stress, and here the stress falls on the first syllable of grandeur; in Greek and Latin the stress is based on quality = the length of the syllable, and you can see how much longer than ‘with’ and ‘the’ is the ‘grand’ of grandeur).

A limerick traditionally uses anapest meter -- that is, with metrical feet consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, and with three feet each for lines 1, 2, and 5, and two feet each for lines 3 and 4.

For the next seven years, despite repeated strokes, my grandfather worked at a small desk, piecing together the legendary fragments into a larger mosaic, adding a stanza here, a coda there, soldering an anapest or an iamb.

But he quotes them with a malicious partiality: for he cuts off the first syllable of the first word in a sentence, and annexes to the last word the first syllable of the following sentence; and thus he forms what is called an _Aristophanean_ anapest, which it is neither possible nor necessary to avoid entirely.